Winebits 169: Fetzer sale, Yellow Tail lawsuit, women and wine lists

• Chilean winery buys Fetzer: Concha y Toro, a Chilean producer whose products range from grocery store wine to the the pricey stuff, will buy Fetzer Vineyards from Brown-Forman, best known for booze brands like Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort. Brown-Forman will get $238 million for Fetzer and a couple of other wine labels as it flees as quickly as it can from the wine business. The Louisville-based drinks giant is yet another multi-national that saw that wine was a little more difficult to manage than it thought, following Constellation and Diageo. At least Brown-Forman was moderately successful with Fetzer, where sales increased from 2 million to 3 million case in the 20 years that it owned the brand. And it apparently turned a profit on the sale, which is more than Constellation did when it sold its Australian brands.

• What's a kangaroo? Depends on who you ask. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company that owns Australian wine behemoth Yellow Tail is suing U.S. wine behemoth The Wine Group over the animal on the latter's Little Roo wines. Yellow Tail says the kangaroo on the Little Roo label looks too much like the wallaby on the Yellow Tail label, and is suing The Wine Group in federal court for trademark infringement. As noted elsewhere on the blog, does anyone really care about this stuff except the high pockets lawyers who are paying for their second homes with these lawsuits?

• Treat women better, please: This, from Lauren Shockey, a restaurant critic at the legendary Village Voice: "[S]everal recent dinners have irked me enough to rant about the way I'm treated when it comes to ordering wine. In short, sommeliers and waiters think that just because I'm a young woman, I'm incapable or don't possess enough knowledge to a) navigate a wine list b) order the wine and c) taste the wine. Which is downright insulting." And Shockey is absolutely correct. Too many waiters and sommeliers treat young women this way, which does seem kind of odd since women buy more wine than men. But, if it makes Shockey feel any better, too many of them treat the Wine Curmudgeon as if he is incapable of ordering wine, as well. I think this has as much to do with the general lack of wine skill that most restaurants expect from their employees.

Comments

[brian]

Well, I will agree with you on the lack of wine skill that , many restaurants display on a regular basis. Why? High turnover, lots of cost in training.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Five minutes a day towards wine in the daily line up goes a very long way. Discuss one wine for a week, drive the point home. Demonstrate wine service, it takes a few minutes, open up a bottle of kitchen wine if necessary. Slim the list down.
It's not hard.

[Jeff Siegel]

And try to treat your customers with respect, right Brian? That shouldn't be too hard, either.